Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

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estevan carlos benson
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Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

Post by estevan carlos benson » Thu Sep 01, 2011 7:25 pm

If so, can you attest to any major performance improvements?
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shutthatdaw
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Re: Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

Post by shutthatdaw » Thu Sep 01, 2011 8:07 pm

Hello

yes I use a small 64G as my boot device with Windows and Ableton program on it. Abletons library is on a seperate drive. The system boots quicker and there seems to be a small difference in Ableton but it still gets its sounds and bits and pieces from a normal SATA harddrive. Is it worth the additional expense, I don't think so.

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estevan carlos benson
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Re: Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

Post by estevan carlos benson » Thu Sep 01, 2011 8:24 pm

shutthatdaw wrote:Hello

yes I use a small 64G as my boot device with Windows and Ableton program on it. Abletons library is on a seperate drive. The system boots quicker and there seems to be a small difference in Ableton but it still gets its sounds and bits and pieces from a normal SATA harddrive. Is it worth the additional expense, I don't think so.

Best wishes
Do you think it would make a big difference if you loaded your Live library off of the SSD? That's what I'm considering if I were to get one.
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shutthatdaw
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Re: Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

Post by shutthatdaw » Thu Sep 01, 2011 9:05 pm

Well you will certainly notice some difference and it should prove to be more reliable, but they are still relatively expensive, and if you have managed to get by without one, my recommendation is to wait until they can be had for a reasonable price. It really depends on how quickly you want to load your library files, for me a second or so wouldn't justify me getting one on that aspect alone.

Best wishes

estevan carlos benson
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Re: Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

Post by estevan carlos benson » Thu Sep 01, 2011 9:08 pm

shutthatdaw wrote:Well you will certainly notice some difference and it should prove to be more reliable, but they are still relatively expensive, and if you have managed to get by without one, my recommendation is to wait until they can be had for a reasonable price. It really depends on how quickly you want to load your library files, for me a second or so wouldn't justify me getting one on that aspect alone.

Best wishes
Well, I'm actually getting lots of disk errors in Live lately due to the amount of audio I'm loading (or maybe the drive is having issues?). This can be managed with additional RAM but that's why I'm curious about an SSD.
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shutthatdaw
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Re: Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

Post by shutthatdaw » Thu Sep 01, 2011 9:39 pm

dont know if maybe a 10000rpm drive might help, they can be had for a reasonable price and with the new SATA standard, might be worth considering


Best wishes

trevox
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Re: Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

Post by trevox » Fri Sep 02, 2011 2:48 am

I use an SSD for my OS and apps and have a second internal 7200RPM drive for audio. I don't save my audio or Live projects in Ableton's Library and have the Library on the SSD.

Your machine will run ridiculously faster (well at least mine does). My MBP boots and opens Live in approx 15 seconds in total. But having a SSD as your system drive is more about making your machine snappier in general. Less wait times to open apps, load projects etc. As a system drive, I would say that getting an SSD is the cheapest, most noticeable upgrade you can make to your machine in general. But as far as running CPU hungry apps or loading massive projects with tons of plugins etc, it is not going to help all that much as your CPU and/or RAM will limit that anyway.

Are you thinking about having a dedicated SSD for you audio/Live Library? Or having your OS on it aswell? I agree with shutthatdaw in that SSD's are far too expensive currently to use for writing large files to. You would eat up and affordable 64/80Gb drive in no time with audio. They are far better suited for your OS/apps at the moment IMO. And bigger drives with enough space to record and store a load of audio just would not be cost effective. I would recommend a second drive - preferably internal - for audio so there are no bottlenecks between reading/writing audio and your OS/apps reading/writing from/to the same drive. Failing an internal drive, I would go for a firewire drive as USB drives will eat up your CPU making overall performance worse.

If you are buying an SSD, do your research. It is not the sequential read/write times you should look out for either, it's the random ones, as when you think about it, the times when you really need a fast hard drive is when hundreds of small files are being read/written to your HD at the same time, not when you are reading or writing one massive file. I have seen drives out there with remarkable sequential read/write speeds, but terrible random read/write speeds, so don't get fooled!

Machinesworking
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Re: Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

Post by Machinesworking » Fri Sep 02, 2011 4:37 am

Hmm? personally I would use a SSD drive for my current projects and sample libraries more than OS.
Sure, you'll save time loading your OS with an SSD, but IMO the main advantage is read/write speeds while producing and performing.

My plan when I finally get a new laptop is to use my regular 640GB laptop HD for storage and an SSD for the OS and the current Project including samples used by that project. My Live Set is about 4GB which the SSD could handle even if it was a 64GB one, and this should be far more stable than running the beast off of a rotational disk.

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Re: Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

Post by luddy » Fri Sep 02, 2011 5:16 am

I have an SSD in the laptop I use on stage. I have configured it to hold my live sets, samples, library, etc.

There are advantages to both ways of organizing things. If you run your machine entirely from SSD(s), you're much less likely to suffer a disk failure of course. That's a pretty big deal. If money were no object I'd set up a machine with either one big SSD or two small ones for live shows, just for the physical reliability of it.

In a mixed setup (mechanical hard drive + SSD) I like the SSD for holding audio files. It doesn't preclude the possibility of an audio hiccup due to disk access, but it helps a lot. The way I look at it, if I have enough RAM then a 32-bit app like Live shouldn't be paging (using the system disk for virtual memory) anyway. So once it launches the system disk should have relatively little work to do. The audio hard drive on the other hand is working through the whole show. So that argues for using the SSD for audio files IMO...

-Luddy

trevox
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Re: Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

Post by trevox » Fri Sep 02, 2011 2:14 pm

Fair points, though given I use my laptop for more than just audio, having a lightening fast OS saves me a ridiculous amount of time. For me, the OS is the most important thing installed and if that fundamental thing is working optimally, the user experience in general is increased. I found myself frustrated at waiting for "things to happen" when I ask my computer and that is now a thing of the past. Also, I have recorded 16 tracks of audio at 96KHz and played up to 30 tracks of audio while running large sample banks and had zero problems with my set up, so it works for me. I would be interested to test the difference between reading/writing audio to a dedicated standard HDD and to an SSD with your OS on it. General rule of thumb is to always read/write audio to a non-system drive.

I like the idea of 2 small SSD's with a larger standard drive for storing off projects you are not currently using, though I have a couple of sample banks that are over 30 Gb's each. So for me, that is not really an option. As Luddy said, there's advantages and disadvantages both ways. What work for one may not work for someone else. In an ideal world, I'd have a 500Gb SSD for storing my audio as I need a lot of space, but that is not going to happen any time soon!

estevan carlos benson
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Re: Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

Post by estevan carlos benson » Fri Sep 02, 2011 6:24 pm

luddy wrote:I have an SSD in the laptop I use on stage. I have configured it to hold my live sets, samples, library, etc.

There are advantages to both ways of organizing things. If you run your machine entirely from SSD(s), you're much less likely to suffer a disk failure of course. That's a pretty big deal. If money were no object I'd set up a machine with either one big SSD or two small ones for live shows, just for the physical reliability of it.

In a mixed setup (mechanical hard drive + SSD) I like the SSD for holding audio files. It doesn't preclude the possibility of an audio hiccup due to disk access, but it helps a lot. The way I look at it, if I have enough RAM then a 32-bit app like Live shouldn't be paging (using the system disk for virtual memory) anyway. So once it launches the system disk should have relatively little work to do. The audio hard drive on the other hand is working through the whole show. So that argues for using the SSD for audio files IMO...

-Luddy

Exactly, this is what I'm considering. Using the SSD to hold projects for live performances, projects I'm actively working on and audio libraries I regularly need to load. So it's working out well for you? Do you have an external SSD?
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luddy
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Re: Does anyone here use Solid State Drives?

Post by luddy » Sat Sep 03, 2011 1:54 am

estevan carlos benson wrote: Exactly, this is what I'm considering. Using the SSD to hold projects for live performances, projects I'm actively working on and audio libraries I regularly need to load. So it's working out well for you? Do you have an external SSD?
Hi, yeah, it's working fine so far. I have a 2009 17" MBP with the SSD installed in place of the optical drive. So, no external drive. I am very leery of external drives on stage. We use it pretty heavily and haven't had any problems, very smooth performance.

-Luddy

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